So please give your best advise in how to promote an online business so it will come up in search engines. I’ve helped my friend’s business get registered on the Yahoo and Google and Bing directories and have yet to see the business’ main site come up. Google does have her craigslist and other such ads she put up for her site, but not the site itself.
No advice, but I’m interested in the same info the OP has requested, as I just started my own lil’ hobby-business.
Me three. I’ve had some good luck with Facebook ads, you might want to give them a try.
If anyone is looking for lingerie please check out www.lavielamour.com 
Google for “search engine optimization”, or “search engine ranking”, or “search engine marketing”, or any other variation you can think of. It’s a huge, huge business. You can try to do it yourself, you can buy tools to help you do it, you can pay someone else to do it for you. It’s a huge business.
A few tips:
Many search engines consider clickthroughs on your links to be votes in favor of your search results being relevant. For example. googling “computer repair fresno” gives you hits, I started on page seven after registering. Every time I went to a customers site I would do that search, keep digging until I found me and click. After a few weeks of doing that i had moved up to page 5 or so.
Crosslinks are another biggie. If you are linked by other people the higher the traffic generated by their site, the higher it will boost SE rankings if it is part of a page indexed by the search engine. Doing it here for example would not matter so much because these pages are generated dynamically as needed. Craigslist was a definite boost to me as well. Things like phone book indexes like yellowpages.com and such are also good for generating high traffic crosslinks.
Right now I generally come up as hit 3-5 on google for my keywords, its a happy place.
Be sure to register for Google Webmaster Tools.
You go through a simple process where you assert your ownership of the web site by placing a special file on your server or placing a special meta tag in your home page.
Once you have done so, you can see loads of good statistics from Google. The dashboard gives you lists of keywords that match your site, lists of incoming links, information about your site map, errors, and lots more.
For example, the other day I looked at the keyword search statistics and saw that Google said my humble blog was number 9 for a search on the word “cruft”
Sure enough, I googled for “cruft” and found an article I wrote about cutting down on cruft when printing web pages. It was the ninth page.
That tool can help you understand how your site is being accessed and ranked.
Get other folks to link to your site. Note that they treat links to your homepage different from links to deeper pages.
This company (Demo - SEO Kit - Thank You) has a bunch of videos and information on using the Web for marketing. They offer a paid monthly service to help you manage things. I use that, but I’m not recommending it. I recommend you and your friend look at the free informational material. If nothing else it should widen your perspective to the broader range of activities that you need to be involved in to be successful. Being on the search engines is just a tiny bit.
Well, when I try to add a meta tag to the header, it shows up in the text itself, which isn’t what I want, and it won’t let me add a html tag at all. Hmmmmm.
There have been a few threads here in the past on this subject. Here is a post I made: Some SEO tips, in this thread: Any experience with hiring search engine optimizers?
Make sure your text is wrapped in the tags correctly… here is a sample head:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8">
<meta name="description" content="PUT A DESCRIPTION OF YOUR PAGE HERE">
<meta name="keywords" content="PUT KEYWORDS HERE SEPARATED BY COMMAS">
<title>YOUR TITLE GOES HERE</title>
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico">
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">
</head>
And to clarify, when I talk about a meta tag for Google Webmaster Tools, I mean a special tag that they give you and tell you to embed in your page.
For example, here is a slightly obfuscated entry from one site I maintain:
<meta name="verify-v1" content="8Q1vCqMMQ+Y4f33t7pBQsJJnEpQmvaEezzwUP3Jm8EE=" />
By slipping this little bit of code in the page header, as nyctea showed, Google Webmaster Tools sees that I have the authority to change my web site. This is a sort of way to prove that I really own the URL before they allow me access to Google stats on it.
FriarTed, how long has it been since you have submitted the URL to the search engines? Sometimes it takes a few weeks at least for your site to be “crawled” and indexed by the search engines.
Another tip is to submit a sitemap to the search engines… This tells the search engine what pages you have, how to search them, and some other information. Here’s an example:
Create this document in a text editor and save it as sitemap.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://URLofYourPage.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2009-06-25</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://URLofYourPage.com/somepage.html</loc>
<lastmod>2009-06-25</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.9</priority>
</url>
</urlset>
Where <loc> is the url of your site, and the various pages within. Do an entry for every page you have on your site.
<lastmod> The most recent date you have updated this page
<changefreq> How often this page is updated, frequencies can be: always hourly daily weekly monthly yearly never
<priority> 1.0 being the most important page on your site, generally the main page, and inner pages being 0.1 - 0.9. Only one page can be 1.0, all the rest must be lower.
Upload this file to the main directory of your site. Then let Google know about it on Google Webmaster tools: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en
More about sitemaps at http://www.sitemaps.org/
Hi, thanks to everyone who responded. I didn’t get the e-mail notifications & just checked last night. I’ll be looking over things this week & following through on your advice. Then I’ll let ya know what happened.
I’m doing that & the GMT keeps saying that it’s non-verified and that some erroneous code is coming up. And the site won’t let me add the alternative google html at all.
It’s been about two-three weeks since I’ve submitted to site to Google, Yahoo & Bing.
I’ll have to study the sitemap info & work on that. I hoped I wouldn’t have to as I thought I had the tag thing down but alas, it’s just not working.
First of all, having the meta tag is not a substitute for submitting a sitemap. You’ll need to do both.
Also I don’t know why your meta tag is not working with Google Webmaster Tools, but you have two options: to add a meta tag to your page or upload a separate html file with a name that they specify. This is what I always do. Here is a quick tutorial on how to do that - just a simple illustrated example with basic steps. Let us know if that works!
In summary, get your site “verified” by Google (as explained above), create and upload a sitemap and submit it to Google Webmaster Tools (here is a screenshot of how to do that too)
Let me know if you have questions!
Well, I finally got the sitemap done. And now I’m trying to figure out how to submit it to my host (www.webs.com). I finally found that they don’t support meta-tags but they also recommend uploading a google-named html file. But when I try to add that, the file name is cut short in the site addy & thus also comes up not verified.
sigh! LOL!
Do you have a free WEBS account? Because that might be why - they have limited capabilities for free accounts. That’s strange if they don’t support meta tags, because as far as I know, that’s just part of standard html… my advice would be to get a better web host where you have complete control/access to your site - I recommend www.godaddy.com - they are cheap, reliable, and very good customer service.
I finally got a personal response from webs.com, they directed me to the right page for site management & I now have the sitemap up and am Google verified!
Thanks so much for walking me through this!